We reviewed the12900Kwhen it was released about six months ago and were very impressed with its performance.
That lead us to conclude theCore i7modelswere the more practical choice for most gamers and enthusiast builders.
They did this before with theCore i9-9900KSback in 2019 and we weren’t that impressed with the result.
This will get us ready for when we review AMD’s 5800X3D in a few weeks.
All benchmarks were run usingWindows 11with Resizable BAR enabled using the latest display drivers and motherboard BIOS versions.
Let’s now get into it.
Bucking the trend is Adobe Photoshop 2022.
Here we’re only looking at a smaller 2% performance improvement for the overclocked KS model.
The last utility benchmark that we’re testing isBlenderOpen Data.
That means the 12900KS uses nearly twice as much power even though it’s slower in this utility.
Also read:What is Chip Binning?
Hitting the Silicon Lottery Jackpot
Cooling
The 12900KS is a difficult CPU to keep cool.
Although it ran very hot, it didn’t thermal throttle.
Gaming Benchmarks
Time for game benchmarking using the RTX 3090 Ti.
Using the same DDR4-3200 memory, the12900Kis 24% faster than the 5950X.
The increased clock frequency of the 12900KS doesn’t amount to much here.
Horizon Zero Dawn is less CPU limited, although we’re using slightly dialed down quality parameters.
The 12900KS is no faster than the 12900K though.
The 12900KS is seen to be 47% faster than the 5950X, which is a massive performance uplift.
Even when using the same DDR4-3200 memory the 12900K was 22% faster than the 5950X.
We see basically no performance difference between the 12900K and 12900KS.
Once again, the 12900KS is no faster than the 12900K inCyberpunk 2077.
When compared to the 5950X, the 12900KS was 24% faster when also using higher clocked DDR5 memory.
How Good Is It?
Frankly, for gamers, the Core i9-12900K wasn’t even the best choice.
So who is it for?
We can’t say we recommend this one.
